GAMEWORLD - Procedural Worlds for Games

Project start: September 2007
Project Leader: Michael Wimmer
Funding:
FFG 813387 - FIT-IT Visual Computing

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The aim of the GAMEWORLD project is to procedurally generate cities, villages and other game environments mainly to be used in tomorrow's video games.

Typically, 3D game and virtual environments are created using off-the-shelf software like Autodesk Maya or MAX. While these tools allow professional artists to produce very high-quality models, this task is becoming more and more labour intensive and time consuming, and therewith expensive, as the detail expected from virtual worlds is continuously increasing. This is one of the most important problems in game development, so that finding suitable automatic modelling techniques has become somewhat of a holy grail of the game industry.

In the Gameworld project, we aim to facilitate and automate the process of generating interactive 3D models, while still giving the designer a high level of control over the visual and architectural style of the created models. We will go beyond modelling building facades, and cover more general objects, including street networks and green spaces, urban furniture, indoor environments, and semantic gameplay annotations.

In order to achieve this goal, we will use sophisticated procedural design grammars, precursors to which have already been developed at the Vienna University of Technology and the Arizona State University. We expect this approach to lead to tools that can be applied in production environments, significantly reducing the effort required to create interactive worlds. Potential application areas of this technology are not limited to video games, but include any field using virtual environments.

The project team combines scientific and industrial experience in an ideal way. The academic partners have already been cooperating on research into procedural modelling techniques previously. Sproing is Austria's leading video and computer game development studio, and will bring its long standing experience and knowledge about the needs of the game development industry to the table.